the price of scenery

I've been trying to get into this for a while, goodness knows what I was doing wrong
Silly poem; called Happy End
Tatiana Nikolayeva
the archetypal babushka,
the fat peasant on the Moscow Metro,
was a pianist.
Dimitri Shostakovitch
admired her so profoundly
that he wrote her a set of preludes and fugues
in the manner of Bach
Tatiana Nikolayeva
sitting there like a woolly teacosy
was playing with magisterial beauty
and she died

I've been trying to get into this for a while, goodness knows what I was doing wrong
Silly poem; called Happy End
Tatiana Nikolayeva
the archetypal babushka,
the fat peasant on the Moscow Metro,
was a pianist.
Dimitri Shostakovitch
admired her so profoundly
that he wrote her a set of preludes and fugues
in the manner of Bach
Tatiana Nikolayeva
sitting there like a woolly teacosy
was playing with magisterial beauty
and she died

I've been trying to get into this for a while, goodness knows what I was doing wrong
Silly poem; called Happy End
Tatiana Nikolayeva
the archetypal babushka,
the fat peasant on the Moscow Metro,
was a pianist.
Dimitri Shostakovitch
admired her so profoundly
that he wrote her a set of preludes and fugues
in the manner of Bach
Tatiana Nikolayeva
sitting there like a woolly teacosy
was playing with magisterial beauty
and she died

We made a joke about it at work many years ago - if you get a life sentence you get remission for good conduct but there's no let-off from marriage.
At the time I thought it was funny (not very just mildly comical) Now with 50 years looming on the horizon there's no joke about it.
OK, so we have a niceish house and a lovely view, but I can't go for a little stroll to the shops to fetch the paper without a perilous hike along a single track road with lots of traffic, so that every few yards I have to take to the ditch. I do have an allover Scotland bus pass - anywhere at all for free, but I have to take the car 7 miles to catch the nearest bus.
Sometimes I wake in the morning and can't think what on earth I want to get up for. Husband is not sociable and can sit and watch TV or read the paper -occasionally a book. If I don't take the car to visit there are days when there's just him and me.
It was bearable with a day or two a week at work - not for the money, for the crack.
It's a luxury to moan at length when nobody I know reads it. Just be warned - don't spend the last few years of your life in solitary confinement. If you've got friends and interests in a town, don't allow yourself to settle for the truly rural.

We don't have any motorways around here, but we do have accidents. Fatals are always a pest because the police shut off the road for ages while they measure and the only way round, if such there be, take 30-50 miles. We have stretches of straightish 2 lane A-roads mixed with blind corners and blind summits - or both together.
You hear about crashes and tut without thinking much more about it.
What happens if one of the parties involved is someone you've known for years?
Imagine a small peugeot coming along a narrow stretch of road when it meets a large subaru head on. The driver of the peugeot is killed and his passenger has an assortment of broken bones. They might as well have hit a tank.
Suppose it had been you in the peugeot - if I'd been that driver it wouldn't have been a tragedy as long as I was killed outright - I've had my allotted span. But a friend of my daughter's had a similar crash a year ago. After sundry operations and re-breaking bones she can only just struggle along with two sticks. I'm too old to put up with that.
If it had one on my children or grandchildren I'd shattered, griefstruck, angry and all the rest.
But how about the the driver of the subaru, whose fault it was. He was never a patient driver and once too often he passed when he had no way of knowing that the road was clear. So he killed a man.
His situation doesn't bear contemplating. It doesn't matter what penalties the law imposes on him, the guilt will stay forever (he's not the kind of man to shrug off such an accident as a bit of bad luck)
It reminds of me some far off transgression of my childhood, what is was, I don't remember. But I do remember a sickness of guilt, of wishing that day could begin again to wipe out whatever I had done wrong.
I had not killed a man. How does one live with that?